Second Life mapping and popularity
I've been playing recently with the Second Life Mapping API-the tool that Linden Lab provides that lets you put Second Life's in-world map on webpages-and had some success in making a basic map utility with it.
And since I'm a Apple Developer Connection member, I got a preview version of Dashcode, the in-house Dashboard Widget development tool that they'll be shipping with Leopard, OS X 10.5. I made a quick widget that reads an RSS feed; that takes about a dozen clicks and 30 seconds, so I cast about for something a little more complicated to play with. Aha! Mashup time!
The result is the Second Life Map Widget. It's pretty nice; you can browse through the map, jump to sims you want to look up, and teleport to the location you've got showing. Once I got it working well enough to release, I put up the webpage there and submitted it to the SL forums and some download sites, including Apple's Dashboard Widget site.
If you're viewing that link soon after I've posted this, you'll notice that the Second Life Map Widget is there on the front page as the Featured Widget. It first showed up there last night; it was in the "Staff Favorites" list below that a few hours after I posted it on the 10th. [Edit: For posterity, here's a screenshot.]
Gosh.
By my logs, there've been 2581 direct downloads of the zip file from my site as of 2007-04-12 10:48:00.
I'm glad (though I'm sure not much will come of it) that I put an invitation to donate and a paypal link on the page before I posted to the directory sites. (There's also my SL name -- Taper Pirandello -- and someone has donated L$100 there, the equivalent of 3.8 US cents. Woo hoo!) [Edit 2: whoops, more like 38 cents. Calculator dropped a decimal.
And since I'm a Apple Developer Connection member, I got a preview version of Dashcode, the in-house Dashboard Widget development tool that they'll be shipping with Leopard, OS X 10.5. I made a quick widget that reads an RSS feed; that takes about a dozen clicks and 30 seconds, so I cast about for something a little more complicated to play with. Aha! Mashup time!
The result is the Second Life Map Widget. It's pretty nice; you can browse through the map, jump to sims you want to look up, and teleport to the location you've got showing. Once I got it working well enough to release, I put up the webpage there and submitted it to the SL forums and some download sites, including Apple's Dashboard Widget site.
If you're viewing that link soon after I've posted this, you'll notice that the Second Life Map Widget is there on the front page as the Featured Widget. It first showed up there last night; it was in the "Staff Favorites" list below that a few hours after I posted it on the 10th. [Edit: For posterity, here's a screenshot.]
Gosh.
By my logs, there've been 2581 direct downloads of the zip file from my site as of 2007-04-12 10:48:00.
I'm glad (though I'm sure not much will come of it) that I put an invitation to donate and a paypal link on the page before I posted to the directory sites. (There's also my SL name -- Taper Pirandello -- and someone has donated L$100 there, the equivalent of 3.8 US cents. Woo hoo!) [Edit 2: whoops, more like 38 cents. Calculator dropped a decimal.